‘The country changed on her,’ said Maya. ‘She arrived in a place and twenty years later she no longer recognized it. There is a letter that’s always fascinated me, it’s from late 1969, one of the first. My mother says that Bogotá is a boring city. She doesn’t know how long she can live in a place where nothing ever happens.’
‘Where nothing ever happens.’
‘Yeah,’ said Maya. ‘Where nothing ever happens.’
‘Jacksonville,’ I said. ‘Where’s that?’
‘North of Miami, way north. I only know from seeing it on maps, because I’ve never been. I’ve never been to the States.’
‘Why didn’t you go with her?’
‘I don’t know. I was eighteen,’ Maya told me. ‘At that age life’s just starting, you’re only just discovering it. I didn’t want to leave my friends, I’d just started seeing someone. . It’s funny because as soon as Mom left I realized Bogotá was not for me. One thing led to another, as they say in movies, and here I am, Antonio. Here I am. Twenty-eight years old, alone and single, all my body parts still in good working order and living alone with my bees. Here I am. Melting in the heat and taking a stranger to see a dead Mafioso’s zoo.’
‘A stranger,’ I repeated.
Maya shrugged and said something that didn’t mean anything.
‘Well, no, but anyway.’
When we got to the Hacienda Nápoles the sky had begun to cloud over and the air was sweltering. It would soon rain. The name of the property was painted in now peeling letters on the arch of the unnecessarily huge white gate — an eighteen-wheeler could easily have driven through — and on the crossbeam, precariously balanced, was a light aircraft, white and blue like the gate: it was the Piper that Escobar used during the early years and to which, he used to say, he owed his wealth. Passing beneath that plane, reading the registration number stencilled on the underside of the wing, was like entering a timeless world. Time, however, was present. To be more precise: it had wreaked havoc. Since 1993, when Escobar was shot dead on a Medellín rooftop, the property had gone into a vertiginous decline, and that, above all, was what Maya and I saw as the Nissan advanced along the paved track between the fields of lemon trees. There were no cattle grazing in these meadows, which, among other things, explained why the grass was so long. The weeds were devouring the wooden posts. That’s what I was staring at, the wooden posts, when I saw the first dinosaurs.
They were what I’d liked most on my first long-ago visit. Escobar had ordered their construction for his children, a tyrannosaurus and a brontosaurus built to scale, a friendly-looking mammoth (grey and bearded like a tired grandfather) and even a pterodactyl floating over the pond with an anachronistic snake in its talons. Now their bodies were crumbling into bits, and there was something very sad and perhaps somewhat indecent in the vision of those cement-and-iron structures out in the open. The pond itself had turned into a lifeless puddle, or at least that’s what it looked like from the path. After leaving the Nissan on a patch of neglected land, in front of a wire fence that might once have been electrified, Maya and I began to walk through the same places we had gone through in a car years ago, as children, almost teenagers, who didn’t yet understand very well what the owner of all that did for a living or why their parents wouldn’t allow them such innocent fun. ‘Back then you weren’t allowed to walk, remember? Nobody got out of their car.’
‘It was forbidden,’ I said.
‘Yes. I’m shocked.’
‘By what?’
‘Everything seems smaller.’
She was right. We told a soldier we wanted to see the animals and asked him where they were, and Maya openly handed him a 10,000-peso note as encouragement. And so, guided or accompanied or escorted by a beardless youngster in camouflage cap and uniform who moved lazily, his left hand resting on his rifle, we arrived at the cages in which the animals were sleeping. The humid air filled with a dirty smell, a mixture of excrement and rotting food. We saw a cheetah lying at the back of his cage. We saw a chimpanzee scratching his head and another running in circles with nothing to chase. We saw an empty cage, the door open and an aluminium basin leaning against the bars.
But we didn’t see the kangaroo who kicked the football, or the famous parrot who could recite the line-up of the Colombian national team, or the emus, or the lions and elephants Escobar had bought from a travelling circus, or the miniature horses or the rhinoceroses, or the incredible pink dolphin Maya dreamt of for a week straight after that first visit. Where were the animals we’d seen as kids? I don’t know why our own disappointment should have surprised us, for the deterioration of the Hacienda Nápoles was well known, and in the years gone by since Escobar’s death various testimonies had circulated in the Colombian press, a sort of extremely slow-motion film on the rise and fall of the criminal empire. But maybe it wasn’t our disappointment that surprised us, but the way we experienced it together, the unexpected and especially unjustified solidarity that suddenly united us: we had both come to this place at the same time, this place had been a symbol of the same things for both of us. That must have been why later, when Maya asked if we could go as far as Escobar’s house, I felt as if she’d taken the words out of my mouth, and it was me who pulled out some wrinkled and grimy money to bribe the soldier with this time.
‘Oh no. You can’t go in there,’ he said.
‘And why not?’ asked Maya.
‘You just can’t,’ he said. ‘But you can walk around it and you can look in the windows.’
That’s what we did. We walked around the perimeter of the construction and together saw its ruined walls, its dirty or broken windows, the splintering wood of its beams and columns, the broken and chipped tiles of the outside bathrooms. We saw the billiard tables inexplicably still there six years later: in those salons that time had darkened and dirtied, the green felt shone like jewels. We saw the pool empty of water, but full of dry leaves and pieces of bark and sticks that the wind had blown in. We saw the garage where the collection of antique cars was rotting away, we saw the flaking paint and broken headlights and dented bodywork and missing cushions and seats converted into a disorder of popping springs, and we remembered that according to legend one of these machines, a Pontiac, had belonged to Al Capone and another, again according to legend, to Bonnie and Clyde. And later we saw a car that had never been luxurious but basic and cheap, however its value was undoubtedly great: the famous Renault 4 in which the young Pablo Escobar, long before cocaine became the source of his riches, competed in local races as a novice driver. The Renault 4 Cup, that amateur trophy was called: the first time Escobar’s name appeared in the Colombian press, long before the planes and the bombs and the debates about extradition, was as a racing-car driver in this competition, a young provincial in a country that was still a small province in the world, a young trafficker who was still making the news for activities other than that incipient trafficking. And there was the car, asleep and broken and devoured by neglect and time, the bodywork cracked open, another dead animal whose skin was full of worms.